Veeam: Virtual Machine Backup

I want to review a product that we’ve tested over the last few weeks. Several years ago we–like many other companies–moved everything to a virtual machine. The phone system is the only thing that still runs on a physical box. Everything else is virtual. And I like it that way.

I won’t go into the virtues of virtual machines, but for several years, they’ve been the way most businesses have gone.

But there has been a problem with our implementation of VMs: backup. That’s not to say that there are not several products in the market that back up virtual machines, but there’s not a good solution (in my opinion) built into the Windows Server operating system. And most of the alternatives that come from third parties are very expensive for a small business.

Enter Veeam. I found it via internet search; my motivation was that one of our old servers that was running some non-critical virtual machines died. I had backups, but they weren’t the most recent, and it got me to searching for a better solution.

Here were my criteria:

It had to work

It had to be easy to install, setup, support, and upgrade

It had to have enough features to make it worthwhile solution

It had to fit my budget

Enter Veeam. I installed the Essentials version, and set up backups of the machines I had.

In general, I wanted the backup to work like this:

Backup the machine to a local hard drive (for speed)

Copy the backups to an external hard drive (for security)

Veeam does both. With job recording and an easy console.

I won’t belabor the point. I had to restore a 40Gb web server today. It took 10 minutes. Less time than I had already spent troubleshooting. And it was before the 30 day trial version ran out.